California Students File Lawsuit To End Tenure

Raylene Monterroza takes questions from the media, as she is joined by eight other California public school students who are suing the state to abolish its laws on teacher tenure, seniority and other protections, during a news conference outside the Los Angeles Superior Court Monday, Jan. 27, 2014 in Los Angeles. Their case Vergara v. California is the latest battle in a growing nationwide challenge to union-backed protections for teachers

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — In a packed courtroom, attorneys unveiled opposing views Monday on the emotionally divisive issue of whether California public school teachers should be protected from dismissal if they are found to be grossly ineffective in their jobs.

The opening volleys in what's expected be a monthlong trial came from lawyers for nine students seeking to abolish teacher tenure and seniority, and from attorneys for the governor, state education department and teacher unions who say such extreme measures are not needed.

"The evidence will show that the impact of an effective teacher is profound and undeniable," said attorney Theodore Boutrous Jr. "This is the gateway to their success in society."

He said he will present experts and studies showing that achievements in later life can be measured by interactions with good teachers.

One study showed that students taught by ineffective teachers had their lifetime income reduced by $2 million, Boutrous said.

The trial, being heard by Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu without a jury, is the latest battle in a nationwide trend.

Dozens of states have moved in recent years to abolish or toughen the standards around giving teachers permanent employment protection and seniority-based preferences during layoffs.

Unions say eliminating such laws would erase a vital support system for a profession that is already losing talented people to higher paid positions in the private sector.

The first named plaintiff in the case, 17-year-old Beatriz Vergara, will testify about teachers falling asleep in class, sitting and reading newspapers or playing YouTube videos while ignoring students, the lawyer said.

The students oppose the tenure system they say keeps bad teachers in classroom. Boutrous said the granting of tenure, which amounts to lifetime employment protection, after 18 months on the job is inadequate to guard against accepting unqualified teachers.

He said there are 275,000 teachers in California but under the current rules, the state dismisses just 10 teachers a year for being ineffective in their jobs.

Lawyers for the state and unions countered that most teachers targeted by such claims usually resign before dismissal is necessary.

Central to the lawsuit is the claim that teachers who fail are shuttled to schools in minority and poor neighborhoods, giving those students an unequal education. Boutrous said that is a violation of the state constitution's guarantee of education.

Deputy Attorney General Nimrod Elias told Judge Treu that 18 months is more than enough time to identify teachers who are "the worst of the worst."

He and attorney James Finberg, representing the teachers union, said the guarantees of tenure, seniority and other benefits are necessary to keep teachers in the low-paying jobs.

"Our schools struggle to retain teachers," he said, noting the challenge is greatest in high-crime areas.

Elias noted that Gov. Jerry Brown has made education a centerpiece of his budget and plans to pour funds into schools in low-income and minority areas.

Boutrous said Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy will be among the witnesses called by the plaintiffs.

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Associated Press writer Julie Watson contributed to this report.

Getting an Accurate Fix on Schools

January 26, 2014

Chancellor Carmen Farina

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New York state test data to be released later this spring will include sobering news for Mayor Bill de Blasio and his new schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña. The data show that only one in four New York City students who started high school in 2009 and graduated in 2013 performed well enough on the Regents exams to meet the state definition of college readiness. Racial and ethnic breakdowns are not yet available. But they are likely to mirror last year’s statistics, which showed striking racial disparities: Only about 11 percent of black and about 12 percent of Hispanic graduates were deemed college-ready.

Mr. de Blasio, who has had a field day bashing his predecessor over this problem, must now find a way to solve it by ramping up the quality of education for poor and minority children. For starters, the city must preserve, at least in part, the controversial school evaluation system that Michael Bloomberg introduced in 2006.

Mr. de Blasio has rightly decided to junk the simplistic, deeply unpopular A-through-F grading system that is used to rate schools. But there is much about the evaluation system that’s worth preserving, including its tight focus on the issue of equity, which means holding schools accountable for how well they educate poor and minority children who are too often written off and left behind.

Historically, the rankings compared a school’s test scores with those of the district as a whole. But under that system, demographics ruled the day; wealthy schools invariably were ranked at the top and poor schools at the bottom. Commendably, the Bloomberg administration devised a way to control for demographically driven differences that enabled it to reach the bedrock question of how much a given school actually improves student learning from year to year. Despite its imperfections, the system found that schools with similar populations of poor and minority children posted vastly dissimilar results. This, in turn, allowed officials and teachers to zero in on a school’s weaknesses, with positive results. The data show that over the last two years, nearly 80 percent of the lowest-performing schools improved their ratings after receiving help in the areas where they were weak.

The A-through-F rating system has several deficiencies. First, it lacks transparency; many people find it hard to understand how reams of complex information are crunched down into a single grade. Second, when people think of letter grades, they think of an overall quality rating, not a rating based largely on special factors. As a result, parents, lawmakers and others were confused when a school at which the overwhelming majority of students were performing well received a mediocre rating because it saw less improvement than schools at which students were not doing as well. It would be better to do away with the overall grade and continue to report a separate rating for each relevant metric — say, one each for overall performance, success with disadvantaged students and so on.

The Bloomberg administration acknowledged shortcomings in the evaluation system, especially at the elementary and middle school levels, where too much weight had been given to testing and too little weight to nontest indicators of school performance (thus forcing weaker schools to spend far too much time teaching students how to take tests). The new evaluation system must give significant weight to how well schools are preparing students for the next level and keeping children on track for college readiness.

The report cards can be improved and revised. But their basic purpose — providing a plausible system for measuring student progress — cannot be abandoned. If it is, city officials will never know how well students are doing until, on graduation day, they find that too many of them do not have the skills they need to go to college.

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Cathie Black Emails

Just saw this. Priceless.

Joe Baranello, DOE Central Records Access Officer, deserves his own show.

NEW CATHIE BLACK EMAILS

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NYSUT Speaks on Common Core

Richard Ianuzzi, President of NYSUT

From Betsy Combier:

So, Mr. Ianuzzi, does your disdain of Common Core mean that you will support and defend teachers whose rights are being denied to them in the evaluation process due to the lack of training in Common Core implementation?

New York teachers turn on Common Core By: Stephanie Simon January 26, 2014 10:12 AM EST LINK

The board of the New York state teachers union this weekend unanimously withdrew its support for the Common Core standards as they have been implemented — a major blow for Common Core advocates who have been touting support from teachers as proof that the standards will succeed in classrooms nationwide. “We’ll have to be the first to say it’s failed,” said Richard Iannuzzi, president of New York State United Teachers. Iannuzzi said he has talked with union leaders in other states who may follow suit. “We’ve been in conversations where we’re all saying our members don’t see this going down a path that improves teaching and learning. We’re struggling with how to deal with it,” he said. The board also unanimously voted no confidence in New York Education Commissioner John King Jr. and urged the state’s Board of Regents to remove him from office. The move on Common Core put the New York union at odds with the national teachers unions, which have steadfastly promoted the new academic standards for math and language arts instruction, now rolling out in classrooms nationwide. Amid fierce and growing opposition to the standards — fanned by conservative political organizations — promoters of Common Core have counted on teachers to be their best ambassadors and to reassure parents and students that the guidelines will lead to more thoughtful, rigorous instruction. Now, one of the biggest groups of educators in the country is on record saying it’s not working. The NYSUT, which represents about 600,000 teachers, retired teachers and school professionals — and accounts for 15 percent of national teacher union membership — is demanding “major course corrections” before it can consider supporting the standards again. It wants more time for teachers to review the Common Core lessons the state has been promoting, and it’s demanding more input on whether they are grade-appropriate. Parents and teachers have complained that the standards push the youngest kids too fast, demanding so much work from kindergarteners that there’s little time for the play that’s deemed essential for young children’s development. On the other end of the scale, they have complained that the high-school math trajectory laid out by the Common Core leaves out key math concepts and does not push top students to take calculus. The union is also demanding that all questions on the new Common Core exams be released so teachers can review them and use them to shape instruction. Students across New York performed miserably on the first round of Common Core exams, given last spring. The NYSUT is insisting on a three-year moratorium on the high-stakes consequences attached to the exams; the union argues that no teachers should lose their jobs and no students should lose their chance at graduation because of poor performance on the tests during a transition period. Iannuzzi said the union still believes “the potential is there” for the standards to succeed, but said that won’t happen unless the state brings everything to a halt and effectively starts from scratch. In response, Commissioner King issued a statement suggesting flexibility; he said he would work with the legislature, governor and Board of Regents to “make necessary adjustments and modifications to the implementation of the Common Core.” But he did not back away from his staunch support of the guidelines, saying that “now is not the time to weaken standards for teaching and learning.” The statement, issued jointly with Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, continued: “Our students are counting on us to help them develop the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in life. The higher standards the Common Core sets will help them do just that.” The Common Core standards are a central plank in President Barack Obama’s education agenda. They were developed by nonprofits and organizations representing states, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but have been heavily promoted by the White House and by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. In Obama’s first years in office, the administration gave states financial and policy incentives to adopt the standards; 45 states and the District of Columbia quickly did so, with little public debate. But as the standards have been introduced into classrooms — in some cases accompanied by notable shifts in math instruction and a much more heavy emphasis on non-fiction texts in English classes — parents have raised questions and conservative advocacy groups have jumped on board with warnings of federal overreach and a loss of local control. Several states, including Alaska, Pennsylvania, Florida and Georgia, have backed away from prior commitments to use new Common Core exams funded by the federal government to assess their students’ progress and measure their achievement against kids in other states. Other states are going further still and considering revoking the standards altogether. “We don’t ever want to educate South Carolina children like they educate California children,” South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley recently told a gathering of Republican women. “We want to educate South Carolina children on South Carolina standards, not anyone else’s standards.” She urged the legislature to overturn the Common Core standards, promising she would sign such a bill the moment it came to her desk. Republican Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana and Scott Walker of Wisconsin have also signaled their distaste for centralized standards. “Told attendees at state education convention that academic standards should be set by people in WI, not DC,” Walker tweeted on Friday. The anxiety has touched Democratic leaders, too. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently said he has concerns about the way the standards have been implemented in his state. And at a hearing in Albany last week, Commissioner King fended off a barrage of tough questions and angry complaints about Common Core from legislators in both parties. “Hit the delay button!” state Sen. George Latimer, a Democrat, demanded, banging on the table for emphasis. Opponents of Common Core said they see the NYSUT vote as a turning point, indicating that the protest movement has expanded beyond parents and political activists. “Were this a small union no one would take notice,” said Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute, a think tank that has been active in opposing the Common Core. “But the size and breadth of NYSUT tells even the casual observer that the wheels are coming off Common Core in NY.” The vote, he said, “clearly gives lie to view that teachers support the whole Common Core apparatus. The fact that NYSUT cuts across over a thousand local unions speaks to how widespread opposition has become.” Carol Burris, an award-winning principal in New York who has been outspoken in opposition to the new standards, called the vote “both courageous and significant.” But Chris Minnich, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, which helped develop the standards, called the vote “unfortunate.” He noted that the standards “were developed with substantial involvement from classroom teachers, and teachers overwhelmingly support these standards.” As evidence of widespread teacher support, the National Education Association points to a poll taken last fall showing that three quarters of its members back the standards. But that support isn’t rock solid. The poll found that 26 percent of NEA members support the Common Core wholeheartedly, another 50 percent back them tentatively, with reservations, and 13 percent said they didn’t know enough to form an opinion. The NEA has heavily promoted the standards as crucial to making American children more competitive with their international peers. It recently launched a website with more than 3,000 sample Common Core lessons, including videos of master teachers presenting the material. The American Federation of Teachers has been a bit more nuanced; it supports the standards, but President Randi Weingarten has called for a moratorium on high-stakes testing while the Common Core exams are phased in. The standards have been promoted as well by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, as well as by prominent education reformers from both parties, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Michelle Rhee, the former chief of Washington, D.C., schools. Supporters of the Common Core have expressed frustration at the mounting opposition, saying the standards have become a convenient scapegoat for anything anyone doesn’t like about education today. “We’re in an environment where anything anyone thinks is wrong, people think [that’s] part of Common Core,” said Michael Cohen, president of Achieve, one of the nonprofits that helped write the Common Core. In an interview last fall, Cohen said he was counting on teachers to be “credible advocates” for Common Core in every state. Teachers, he said, would be able to parry the conspiracy theories and “get the argument grounded again.”

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Laurel Sturt: Arrest Commissioner King and Chancellor Tisch

 

Wake Up Call For New York's Gov. Cuomo

Posted: 01/10/2014 5:28 pm

LINK



Laurl Sturt

In a recent New York state public forum about the Common Core with Education Commissioner John King and state Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch in Manhattan, the room was rife with rancor, as it had been in previous forums all over the state. Late in the evening, when it finally came my turn to speak, I sought to enliven the soporific atmosphere with a surprising declaration. Along with the rest of the shills for corporate education, I announced, Commissioner King and Chancellor Tisch should be arrested on several counts: Educational neglect, child abuse, armed robbery (the theft of an authentic, quality education from our children), assault with a deadly weapon (their power and forcing a fake education on our kids), murder in the first degree (the killing of our children's spirit and their innate love of learning); and treason -- they are traitors to our children and the nation's future, and their destructive actions endanger our global status, posing a threat to our national security.

Only half tongue-in-cheek, given the current climate, my declaration was met with widespread and resounding approval. In New York state, demoralized students, furious parents and disgusted educators are fast reaching critical mass with unpopular education initiatives. In early January, education activists are staging a long overdue assault on Governor Andrew Cuomo, who's so far stayed off the radar and made Education Commissioner John King take the heat in irate public forums. The statewide protests are timed to take place around Cuomo's annual State of the State Address.

High-stakes testing is one of the rallying points for the spreading dissent. In 12 years of a destructive focus on test prep and testing, no New York legislative body has challenged this catastrophic education policy. Yet just last month, the New York City Council passedResolution 1394, calling for the elimination of high-stakes testing in New York City schools. As such, it joins thousands of school districts across the country, including the vast majority of those in Texas, where the obsession with testing originated. Vast numbers of people are saying no to the replacement of quality education with a shallow measure, testing, which indicates neither students' achievement nor that of their teachers. Yet New York's Education Commissioner John King has responded to this outcry, so resounding that tens of thousands of children are being opted out of the tests by parents, with his embrace of the Common Core State Standards, which actually double down on high-stakes testing.

The increased emphasis on testing is a natural consequence of the Common Core, designed overwhelmingly by education businesses who stand to profit from the new mandates, many of them testing companies. Filling the coffers of these testing businesses, to the tune of billions of dollars, has been deemed more important than actually testing the Common Core. As much as it emphasizes testing, the Common Core itself has never been tested, but rushed into implementation by special interests. Imagine if pharmaceutical drugs were not tested in this way, and any poison could be forced on the public, because the bottom line of the drug company is more important than the safety of consumers. In any other field, we would never validate untested, unresearched theories -- let alone use them on our most valued treasure and national resource, our children. Yet Commissioner King and other education "leaders" across the country have seen fit to exploit our children as guinea pigs in a vast experiment, while exploiting public dollars for private profit.

The focus on testing is just one part of the systematized destruction which stands in for education these days. And the tests, moreover, have become, overnight, absurdly harder, guaranteeing the kids' failure and that of their teachers, whose job ratings, thanks to Race to the Top mandates, are tied to them. But worse, when they're not prepping for tests or taking them, our kids are being subjected to curriculum several years in advance of what they are developmentally capable. The entire school day has become a grueling obstacle course, capped off with mountains of homework so obtuse, their parents are not even able to help with it.

Kids are feeling like failures everywhere, screaming, crying, throwing tantrums -- literally banging their heads on the desk. Vast numbers of kids who used to love school are now refusing to attend. After a morning of testing, entire classes are spending the afternoon in tears. School administrators have had to call the state and ask, "What do we do when there's vomit on a student's test answer sheet?"

Gov. Cuomo has exacerbated the conflict over education by supporting the collection of students' private information, 400 points of data to be shared with private education businesses to further extract money from parents, kids and districts. Nine states originally signed up for this ill-conceived and astoundingly intrusive facet of the Race to the Top grant competition, yet all, but New York dropped out of the program because of valid privacy concerns. So this is yet another battle for beleaguered parents and educators to fight in New York state.

Governor of a state home to Sleepy Hollow and slumbering Rip Van Winkle, Andrew Cuomo's about to be jolted from his long winter's education nap. An awakened citizenry is sounding the alarm, and for state officials in New York, the snooze button's no longer an option.

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Laurel M. Sturt, a former New York City public school teacher, is the author of the book 'Davonte's Inferno: Ten Years in the New York Public School Gulag.'

On the issue of Retaliation, the Investigators of OSI, SCI, and OEO, and Why It Is Important to Fight

The  retaliation against those teachers,  (see Polo's NY State Supreme Court Complaint that he filed against the DOE, Principal Lisa Caraballo, NYSUT, Michael Best and the PEP)parents, and even students that readers have seen

Polo Colon

posted on this blog and my website is exactly what happened to countless parents, teachers, and members of School Leadership Teams throughout New York City over the past 12 years, including me. We are whistleblowers, we hold people accountable for their actions. Our rights to due process were denied to us.

For this reason, when I do a 3020-a, we always call in several witnesses to help support the testimony of the Respondent, and everyone still working anywhere is given a subpoena, so that if a principal or anyone at the school decides to retaliate, we are ready to stop it. All hearings should be open and public (if the charges are false).

 Condon v Sabater: Judge Huff Rules Against SCI Chief Richard Condon 

 Winning Your 3020-A: the Investigation (Part 1)

Two Reports, "Investigating The Investigators", and 'The Gill Commission Report' (1990) Dont Improve New York City Public Schools

Richard Condon

Be vigilant and document everything. You can win any fight if you do not give up.

I did not start my blog, NYC Rubber Room Reporter, until 2007. but since I studied the Soviet and American Military Industrial Complex at Columbia University and at Johns Hopkins' School For Advanced International Studies, and my dad was Assistant Attorney General of the State of New York under Louis Lefkowitz, I knew that governments exist because they can keep their operations secret. Secrecy is a major issue in politics, and whenever a whistleblower
comes along, this person becomes the magnet for investigations, and harm.

So in 2003 when I started visiting the rubber rooms, asked by David Pakter to speak there with UFT members, I was not completely shocked with the false claims and baseless charges filed against tenured teachers. Luckily, I was given the "Mein Kampf" of the Bloomberg administration, the successful removal of the NYC Board of Education and a general public vote, as a way to obtain and keep democracy out of public schools. I thought that someone had to document this process known as "the rubber room", or "rubberization" (my definition of 'rubber room' is that this is not a place but a process), so I started attending the teacher trials known as 3020-a. The first "teacher trial" I attended, as an observer, lasted several months, the arbitrator was Senior panel member Martin Scheinman, and David's NYSUT Attorney was Chris Callagy.

Betsy Combier and Chris Callagy (picture taken by David Pakter)

We all got to know each other very well. I have been documenting the teacher trials ever since, for my book. The purpose of my writing on my blogs, website, and my book is to stop this random, arbitrary and shocking mess of teacher abuse in NYC and America as well as parent and student harassment. Really, what do cockroaches do when the light turns on? They scamper into the nearest dark crack or hole. NYC DOE personnel despise anyone who challenges them on their "right" to harm people by subterfuge and threats of harm. They want the victim to be so scared of future retaliation that they run away, never to be heard from again. You may hear of harassment at 3020-a hearings, by NYSUT Attorneys and the DOE attorneys; and a push for "settlement" which is nothing more than the Respondent/victim declaring he/she is guilty of a crime and will never sue the DOE for finding out. I usually do not support anyone who is innocent of a charge to admit to doing it simply to stop harassment. If you didn't do it, fight to prove your innocence.

 I detailed my story about exposing the theft at Booker T. Washington MS 54 at 108th and Columbus Avenue in Manhattan (the post is dated 2004). I was PTA President and on the School Leadership Team (SLT)  in 2000-2001, 2001-2002 school years. (I still have two original copies of the "Green Book" of rules for SLT members!) Larry Lynch was principal. I had just entered the public school system in 1996 with my oldest daughter when I was asked to run for PTA President and won the position in May, 1998. I understood that I would be on the new entity called "School Leadership Team", and like most parents elected to a position of leadership, I studied the law, rules, and regulations under which we, the SLT were to perform our duties. One of the most important was to write the CEP, which was a detailed account of the money spent at the school. Almost immediately I realized that the principal of MS 54 at the time, Larry Lynch, would not give us any facts about the special needs kids.

 

I nicely brought this up at meetings, and told everyone that I would discuss with Larry about this and about how we must have this data before we handed in our CEP to the District 3 office, under the supervision of Superintendent Patricia Romandetto and her lackey and enabler, DJ Sheppard. A parent involved at the school for a long time told me, "You better not say anything, you will be retaliated against". I did not believe her.

 

When it came time to submit the CEP and we still had no data for the special needs kids, and several other items, in 2001, Larry told us that we should just hand it in without signing the signature page. I told him that this was not ok, as we did not have the data. I wouldn't sign as PTA President. Then, about a week later at the beginning of March 2001, I got a call from a source within the District 3 office, and this person told me that Larry had submitted the CEP. I went over to the District 3 office and was handed a copy of the CEP he had handed in. He had filled in missing data with numbers that I and the rest of the SLT had never seen, and which I knew not to be true, like the number of students in special education, the number of providers in the building on what days, etc. Also, he stapled to the front the signature page of everyone copied from the previous year, with the date whited out. I copied each page and took the documents home.

 

The next year Pat Romandetto, DJ Sheppard, and their allies at MS 54 (white parents) voted to remove me as PTA President, and I started my website Parentadvocates.org. My oldest daughter, at Stuyvesant with an IEP, had her IEP ripped up, the AP Jay Biegelson put his name on the attendance sheet as her father so that I would never know what happened, and my daughter was told that her mom could not be found. I was the Editor of the PA Bulletin at Stuyvesant, and in the school every day. All four of my daughters were attacked by the DOE and parent/district personnel/administrators who the DOE "convinces" they must be allies in order to attack whistleblowers. Secrecy is the number 1 priority. But I did not back down, and my daughters did not want me too.

Then another daughter got into Stuyvesant and accepted the offer starting in 2003. I was afraid but I did not want her to be, so I tried to discuss other options, all in vain. She wanted to be there. I remained very active in Stuyvesant, and the Chinese parents came to me with questions about the money donated to the PA in 2005. They had documented a missing amount of more than $380,000.

Scott Stringer

One of the parents was a relative of Attorney Jimmy Yan, who worked for Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer (pictured above). We made three appointments to let both Jimmy and Scott know about the documents showing that several hundred thousand dollars were not in the PA bank account, and there could be possible tax fraud. We met with Jimmy. He promised to help us retrieve the money after we showed him the documents, tax forms, PA budget and PA financial forms. I still have his message on my cellphone.

Jimmy Yan

I wrote my article in 2006 on what happened, including the call I received from the two attorneys who were given the job of auditing the Stuyvesant PA books. They called me up and whispered into my telephone, "Betsy, we have to tell you that there is so much money missing from the Stuyvesant PA that we cannot do an audit".

Jimmy called me as well, and told me that he was contacting Superintendent Alexis Penzel, and would get back to me. That was the last time we spoke, and we never heard from Scott Stringer. Needless to say, when I read the article below about how Scott Stringer, who is now the NYC Comptroller, will be holding Mayor Bill De Blasio accountable for his actions, I'm skeptical. Very skeptical. We will see........

Scott Stringer Promises to Hold Mayor de Blasio Accountable

Colby Hamilton

Scott Stringer and His Transition Team

LINK

SOHO — Comptroller-elect Scott Stringer vowed to hold incoming Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio accountable for the city's finances on Monday, even as he spoke of cooperation and partnership between the two offices.

“There's so much that we can do together in the spirit of cooperation, even though my role is to be the watchdog. And I will be the watchdog,” Stringer said. “My role is to audit every city agency.”

Stringer made his comments during the announcement of his transition team at the Talking Transition tent on Canal Street in SoHo. He said he and de Blasio were “excited about going from the steps of City Hall to actually being inside City Hall.”

He said the comptroller and mayor have joint responsibilities in handling and representing the city’s financial interests, even as the comptroller seeks to act as a check on the mayor.

“There is a relationship between [the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget] and the comptroller's office that is very real and serious,” Stringer said. “But you also have a fiduciary responsibility to monitor city agencies [and to] hold City Hall accountable.”

Stringer named a slate of 19 advisers who he said would help him build out his office before he takes over in January. Robert Kasdin, a senior vice president at Columbia University, and Ana Oliviera, the president and CEO of the New York Women’s Foundation, were announced as Stringer’s transition co-chairs.

Kasdin said he expected the team would help Stringer create a comptroller’s office that was “the nation’s preeminent model for fiscal management.”

@bcolbyhamilton

One of the major problems with the DOE's policy of secrecy and retaliation is the lack of control the Department has over their hired help. As can be seen in my exposure of investigators who work for OSI, SCI, and OEO (see here my exclusive on the sexual assault on Natalya Sokolson-Gordon), people hired to do an "investigation" have been watching too much television. In all their ("the investigators") reports there is usually something that does not make sense. Dig it up and throw it back.

These agents of the Department are focused on getting information from the teachers they are told to investigate AFTER the teacher has been found guilty by the Principal/AP of the school. So, their purpose is actually to get information to substantiate the so-called "fact" that indeed, the person has already committed some kind of crime, and investigations are started with the intent to prove it. A great defense at 3020-a hearings is to prove them wrong. I call it "proving you are innocent after an allegation proves you are guilty" routine.

 Betsy Combier

Campaign Leader Tara Heidinger Asks For Cameras in Special Needs Classrooms

Tara Heidinger campaign leader

To: President Barack Obama an all State Governors 
Cameras in special needs classrooms for safety

Cameras In the Special Needs Classrooms

Dear Mr. President and all State Governors : 
My name is Tara Heidinger. My son Corey has autism. I have started a campaign to have audio/video cameras placed in all special needs classrooms for the safety of our nonverbal/little verbal, special needs children. Recently, my son came home from school upset because of an incident that had taken place in which the aide in his classroom physically and mentally assaulted him. Another student in his class witnessed this event and being verbal, this student was able to tell me what happened. When I brought this to the school's attention, I was told there would be an investigation. The conclusion of their investigation was the boys told them it didn’t happen and that my son was making it up. My son had visible marks on his body from the assault and the boys continue to tell me to this day that this incident happened. The boys still tell me till this day it happen. They said they were punished for saying it happen. Had there been cameras in the classroom, this incident might have never happened or at least the aide would be held accountable for her actions. As a parent, could you imagine your girls not being able to express to you what others might be doing to them? It's a permanent worry in the minds of parents of special needs children.

My story is only one of the many of both physical and verbal abuse as well as neglect taking place in special needs classrooms all over the country. But cameras would not only serve as protection for our children, they would also serve as protection for teachers and aides against false accusations and retaliation from within their own districts. Cameras would serve as a wonderful training tool as well.

I have taken the initiative to create a Facebook pagehttps://www.facebook.com/CamerasInSpecialNeedsClassrooms and a petition addressed to you, Sir, asking that special needs classrooms be equipped with cameras to protect our most vulnerable and precious children. You can also listen to my own personal story on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISfTx01BrBk&feature=youtu.be

I am asking that you please support my efforts to make this happen. With technology advancing every day, this is something that must inevitably happen. We need your positive leadership to move this campaign forward. Please feel free to contact me with questions or concerns. Thank you for all you do for us every day. taraheidinger@netzero.com 
Sincerely, Tara Heidinger/Cameras In Special Needs Classrooms

A grassroots movement to put cameras in classrooms, driven by the parents of special-needs students, is simmering across the country. It's a personal crusade for many of the parents who say their children have suffered abuse at the hands of teachers and classroom aides with unsatisfying consequences.

Parents in states such as Ohio, Texas, Michigan, New Jersey and Tennessee have taken to the Internet to promote their cause with petitions, videos, Facebook pages and letters to the president. Many of their children either cannot speak or have difficulty with verbal communication.

Tara Heidinger describes son Corey, 8, as "the happiest boy in the world." He loves all sports -- basketball is his favorite -- and is quick to beat most of the video games he gets. He's shy around kids, but comfortable around adults.

He is also autistic and can become "hysterical" if faced with change in his schedule or day-to-day routine in their hometown of Lakewood, Ohio.

When Corey arrived home from school May 10, he was "very sad," Heidinger said.

"He's usually happy and joyous, but this day he was very sad and he said, 'The teacher [was] mean to me,'" Heidinger said. "I really didn't think anything of it because teachers can tend to be 'mean' to get their point across."

But later on, some of Corey's more verbal classmates told Heidinger that the teacher's aide had "grabbed Corey by the arm really hard" and "screamed in his face" to stop his crying when he became upset.

Heidinger, 34, said Corey had visible marks on his skin from an alleged physical and verbal assault, so she went to the school and confronted the principal.

"I was scared out of my mind. She didn't believe the story I was telling her," Heidinger said. "They tried to say the boys made up the story, that it could be their autism."

When school officials told Heidinger there was no proof of the alleged attack, she asked whether they had cameras in the classrooms or in the hallways. The answer was no.

"There should be cameras in these classrooms because so many of these children don't speak at all," she said. "Any safety issues for children should override any privacy issues for staff."

So Heidinger decided to take matters into her own hands and make it her personal mission to get cameras in the classroom, focusing first on classrooms with children who cannot speak or who have low verbal communication abilities.

She sent a letter to President Obama and she has about 4,000 supporters between her Change.org petition and her Facebook page.

Florida psychologist and special education attorney Katie Kelly has been in frequent contact with Heidinger, calling her a "relentless" advocate for the cause.

Kelly is the mother of a child with Asperger's syndrome and represents many clients whose special-needs children have been abused at school. "It's just horror story after horror story," Kelly said.

She is contacted several times a month by parents from across the country who say their developmentally challenged children have been abused physically, verbally or sexually.

The parents are connecting online and slowly organizing their cause.

"This movement has come directly from parents who have been affected by having their children be abused at school," Kelly said. "One by one, in different states, people have seen that and it's resonated in them and they've taken up the call.

"There's a national dream that all families are happy and all schools and classrooms are happy and you really don't want to open the door and see that it's really ugly in there," she said.

Google alerts on Kelly's computer for abuse stories are "a daily occurrence" and she is continually "stunned" at how many cases are reported, as well as the ones she imagines are not reported.



"I think what we see is the tip of the iceberg," she said. "When you're dealing with kids who can't talk or who have very low verbal skills and you're seeing this amount of reporting, it seems to me that there are more parents out there who aren't discovering it."

The National Association of Special Education Teachers did not respond to request for comment, but the association's executive director, George Giuliani, has expressed uneasiness with the perceived rise in parents' using audio and video equipment to make their own secret recordings. He indicated that it might be time to consider a more formal method of supervision, according to The Associated Press.

"In classrooms where children are nonverbal, unable to communicate, defenseless, we should start to have a discussion of whether cameras in the classroom are necessary," Giuliani told the AP in April.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) did not immediately respond to request for comment, but its Virginia branch supported earlier this year a pending state bill that would prohibit closed-circuit cameras in schools to monitor students, "unless it is necessary to protect the physical safety and security of students."

As for the parents who discover any abuse, the fight is tough. Without evidence, it is often the disabled child's word versus a school's denial. Kelly said that when parents don't have photographs or video of the alleged abuse, there is often not much they can do.

"I'm absolutely a proponent of cameras in the classroom," she said. "I think when you have many vulnerable children together, it provides safety not only for the children, but for the staff. Accusations can go both ways."

Kelly said that case law has shown that privacy rights do not extend to the classroom. Many common spaces in schools, like cafeterias, have cameras, as do school buses. She said case law has only shown that cameras are prohibited in areas such as bathrooms and locker rooms.

"Schools are very hesitant to look for abuse because it opens them up to potential litigation," Kelly said. "They don't want to open that can of worms so they just deny, deny, deny."

Kelly acknowledges that while abuse is never the answer, teachers and schools are faced with a "perfect storm in education" of increasingly challenging factors including overcrowding in classrooms, diminished resources and low pay.

"I think that's what's leading to a meltdown," she said.

The abuse stories that make it into headlines are often the ones where parents take on the role of detective and expose the abuse with video or audio recordings.

A New Jersey dad who suspected something was "horrifyingly wrong" at school when his autistic son began acting violently had the boy wear a digital recorder and discovered teachers verbally abusing him.

When the dad, Stuart Chaifetz, listened to the recordings, he heard the teacher and aide calling his son Akian names, making fun of him, yelling at him and having inappropriate conversations in front of the children.

"He's the best human being I've ever met and these people were taking it away because they were crushing his spirit," Chaifetz said of his son. "If I had not spoken out and released that video, it would have been like it never happened, except to Akian because it happened to him and he knows it."

School officials were "shocked and horrified" by the audio, Chaifetz said. The aide was fired but the tenured teacher could not be fired and was moved to another school.

Chaifetz has received thousands of emails of support, many of which have been from parents' pushing for cameras in classrooms, which Chaifetz supports.

"Nobody wants anyone to see what's going on in some of these rooms," Chaifetz told ABCNews.com. "Let's stop just saying that schools are about the kids and let's actually make them about the kids. It's not going to hurt anyone that's doing a good job."

But not everyone is so certain that cameras in the classroom are the way to go, and Sara Gelser of the National Council on Disability calls the push for cameras in classrooms "a symptom of a larger problem."

"I don't know that cameras in the classroom themselves are the answer to the problem," Gelser said. "I think what we really need to be looking at is better regulation."

Gelser said she understands the frustrations of families, but can see why schools might be reluctant to undergo the constant supervision.

"I worry about issues of privacy in terms of filming people. Many of us don't like the idea of being filmed," she said. "I understand why people are raising the issue. These families are desperate and there are very few choices that are left to them."

Her National Council on Disability is the independent federal agency that recommends disability policy to the president, Congress and all other federal agencies.

Whether cameras in classrooms will be a solution parents and educators agree on, it is clear to all parties involved that something must be done to protect special-needs children.

"We shouldn't be putting the onus on the parents to become Sherlock Holmes or Nancy Drew to figure out what's going on during the school day," Gelser said. "No one should have to protect their child from school."